Sorry for my late comment response.

What distribution are you using? The reason I ask is that lets say you 
are using CentOS 7, CentOS 7 uses Chrony (http://chrony.tuxfamily.org/) 
for its ntp service (installed and running by default) and ntpd will 
have all sorts of problems unless you remove Chrony first.

Gilbert

On 9/9/2015 7:21 AM, James Mcphee wrote:
> What I'd do is ntpdate -bu <time server> to force the time, then do an 
> ntpd start and check messages to see if it complains about anything, 
> check process list to see if it started, and do an ntpq -c opeers 
> after 15 minutes to see what it thinks about life.  You seem to have 
> an ntpd.log, so maybe that has some info.
>
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 7:50 PM, Tejeev Patel <tejeevpatel@gmail.com 
> <mailto:tejeevpatel@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     So I'm thinking there has to be some sort of concurrent startup
>     runlevel issue.  Not really sure how to adjust this, but do you
>     see any place in that init script that could cause this or
>     something left out of the dependencies or something?  Here's the
>     first bit of the init.d again:
>     ### BEGIN INIT INFO
>     # Provides:        ntp
>     # Required-Start:  $network $remote_fs $syslog
>     # Required-Stop:   $network $remote_fs $syslog
>     # Default-Start:   2 3 4 5
>     # Default-Stop:
>     # Short-Description: Start NTP daemon
>     ### END INIT INFO
>
>
>     On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 7:23 PM, Tejeev Patel
>     <tejeevpatel@gmail.com <mailto:tejeevpatel@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>         Hi all,
>         Thanks for your replies James and Hans.  I've included some
>         responses in the bellow email:
>
>             moin moin TJ,
>
>             what James said in regards to debugging ntp :).
>
>         Ill check on these step tickers, but my understanding was that
>         the -g option should take care of that.  Can I put in sdout's
>         in the init script to log when stuff is being done so i can
>         maybe trace where it quits?  Any recommendations on where to
>         put them in or how to do some debugging here?
>
>
>             Here are some other things to check.
>
>             Is there some ntp process already running?
>
>             ps auxw | grep ntp
>
>         No NTP process already running.
>
>             Is there a config file in /etc/default/ that has an entry
>             to not start
>             ntp?
>
>         Only see an ntpdate config that basically says to look at the
>         server list in ntp.conf rather than it's own and a ntp config
>         that includes the option -g that I was originally looking to
>         include here.
>
>             Is ntpdate installed and configured to prevent ntpd from
>             starting?
>
>         ntpdate is apparently installed
>
>             As James mentioned, ntp will refuse to change the time if
>             it's off too
>             much. Check to see if the systems are within a couple of
>             minutes of the
>             actual time.
>
>         ntp will quit if the time is off by 1000 s or more but the -g
>         option should override that.
>         ( -g Normally, ntpd exits with a message to the system log if
>         the offset exceeds the panic threshold, which is 1000 s by
>         default. This option allows the time to be set to any value
>         without restriction; however, this can happen only once. If
>         the threshold is exceeded after that, ntpd will exit with a
>         message to the system log. This option can be used with the -q
>         and -x options.)
>
>             Verify your hardware clock is set to UTC.
>
>             Make sure your OS is set at the proper offset from UTC,
>             e.g. you're set to
>             now and AZ time zone, rather than now and eastern time zone.
>
>             If the boxen are servers they should be set to UTC. Star
>             date blah, blah,
>             blah and all that.
>
>         Both hardware and software are set to UTC on our servers.
>
>
>             cioa,
>
>             der.hans
>
>
>
>
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>
> -- 
> James McPhee
> jmcphe@gmail.com <mailto:jmcphe@gmail.com>
>
>
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